If anyone notices anything broken, give a yell or something.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Some nice screenshots at the link, too.

So anyway, Kelly at dreamhost fat-fingered the firewall and locked out a half-million customers, which wasn’t a big deal to me, but did lead me to head over to dreamhoststatus.com and have some fun snarking in the comments at all the whiny bastards who claim to be losing a zillion dollars a minute every time their nine buck a month shared web hosting hiccups, and posting little haikus:

my blog’s five readers
yearn for my half-assed ramblings
dreamhost strikes again

Just another exciting Friday nite Saturday morning at Archenemy HQ.

UPDATE: a Sandbox design contest!

The WP theme in use here at archenemyblog features some PHP functions that gather info about each post, and add classes to them, like:

<div id="post-914" class="hentry p7 publish author-jmd category-general y2007 m03 d08 h10">

letting me do things like

.author-jmd {
background-color: #D1E7EF;
}

to prolific co-blogger JMD’s posts. This looks to be extremely handy.

(I knew that you were supposed to be able to style just about anything you could think of with Scott’s WP themes, but didn’t realize this was how it was done until I got around to looking at the code)

Oh dear! This post is just another example of the decline in standards at the “Economist” and the leftward drift that seems to have accelerated since the change in Editor. You’ve drifted a long way from your supposed standards of support for “Free trade, free markets” and I’m assuming individual liberty.

[...]

Go read the post, and revel in the rest of comment #2 (no comment permalinks, apparently). The abundance of leftist BS slipped in to Economist articles as unquestioned fact is downright appalling. I’m glad the Economist is blogging, allowing comments, and printing letters to the Editors, though – one can only hope this will lead to more interaction with their readers, and some course correction.

I imagine it’ll be a real hoot.

Paul Pope has joined the blogosphere. Very cool!

(He’s got a Flickr account, too, which made me wonder – do Flickr photostreams have RSS feeds you can sub to? Why, yes – they do.)

6. You have the skin color of a corpse
7. You would rather comment on blogs than talk to people face to face
8. You consider any story, idea or photo bloggable
9. You visit everyone on your blogroll at least once a day
10. You have 50 blog posts saved as drafts, none of which are finished
16. You try to recruit friends and family to blog
20. You feel sort of empty inside, let down and sad when a favorite blog does not post for a day or two*
24. A weekend without access to the internet means that there are over 2000 unread posts in your feed reader! (no kidding, I’m looking at 2794 unread entries right now!)

(Ones I’m particularly guilty of are bolded)

* One funny thing is that after returning home from the occasional lunch (or less enjoyable lunch delivery, but hey, I’m also a quesadillaholic) with TJIC/TVR folks, I get irritable when I note that there have been no updates at TJICblog while we were out. Makes no sense, I know.

2. BOSTON.COM CONTENT AND MEMBER SUBMISSIONS

2.1 The contents of the Boston.com Internet service are intended for your personal, noncommercial use. All materials published on Boston.com (including, but not limited to news articles, photographs, images, illustrations, audio clips and video clips, also known as the “Content”) are protected by copyright, and owned or controlled by The New York Times Company, The Boston Globe, Boston.com, or the party credited as the provider of the Content. You shall abide by all additional copyright notices, information, or restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Service.

2.2 The Service and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of this Agreement), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.

2.3 You may download or copy the Content and other downloadable items displayed on the Service for personal use only, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein. Copying or storing of any Content for other than personal use is expressly prohibited without prior written permission from Boston.com or the copyright holder identified in the copyright notice contained in the Content.

2.4 Certain Content is furnished by the Associated Press and Reuters, and Boston.com will not be liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions in any such Content, or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof, or for any damages arising therefrom.

I may not create new works from, or distribute, display or exploit in any way, in whole or in part?

Reeeeeallly.

For the past couple of years, my reading of the Globe has been

• exclusivly online
• motivated primarily by intent to mock

So, I’ve gone from paying to read Globe advertisers print ads to not paying to view Globe advertisers online ads, to not paying and not viewing any ads. I have to applaud the underpants gnomes geniuses running the Globe. Nice job.

The search for a correct solution continues.

UPDATE: OK, this is mostly a record for myself, but playing around with various hacks has led me to this: I like the Old Style Upload plugin for the old functionality, and commenting out line 220 in wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and line 184 in wp-admin/edit-page-form.php removes the new upload feature from the post-writing page. This should do the trick for me until they get this thing working correctly. It’s almost a fantastic feature, and probably will be with the next minor release. David House has a nice plugin fixing the default directory problem, but the new interface thing is just too kludgy even without the directory hassle.

Argh. This really isn’t worth the time – I should be doing other things. Back to work.

ANOTHER UPDATE: pasting the URL for an image uploaded with the old-fashioned upload interface causes the new writing tool to wrap [code] [/code] tags around the image URL. So, one needs to click on the HTML button and edit those out and click on “update”. I’m eagerly awaiting fixes to these irritating behaviors.

I’m told that there are studies showing that women who skip their periods all together are at higher risk for stroke. Unfortunately, I don’t have an authoritative reference.

I just wanted to add (and couldn’t, there) that I’ve read an article (several years ago in the New Yorker, but can’t find it in their archives) suggesting that periods induced by oral contraceptives may have deleterious effects. The reason given was that since women live longer today than they ever have, and spend greater portions of their lives not being pregnant, they are subjected to a greater number of periods over their lifespans than at any time in history, which, if I recall, significantly increases the likelihood of their contracting various kinds of cancers. Or something like that, anyway.

]]> http://blog.archenemy.org/2006/01/03/blogbody-contraception/feed/ 5 http://blog.archenemy.org/2006/01/01/shiny-and-new/ http://blog.archenemy.org/2006/01/01/shiny-and-new/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:32:58 +0000 dff http://blog.archenemy.org/?p=447 Continue reading →]]> … on the backend, anyway. WP 2.0 has lots of very cool improvements. Hopefully everything will work as advertised (Spam Karma 2 will apparently continue to work, with the addition of a new plug-in).

UPDATE: If you actually use WP’s posting UI, and not some crazy coding tool that takes fifteen years to learn and three lifetimes of daily use to master, this is a pretty nice little enhancement. And alas, while the apparently popular Tiger Admin plugin, which does a very nice job rearranging the layout of your admin page, looked like a great idea, I found the actual visual stylings too ugly to look at for more than a few seconds. I know I could change ‘em, but I’m too lazy/busy. Ah, well.

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